What do you mean here? To open the file /var/log/messages with syslogd? How?

To view use a common editor .
The files might be not existant if syslogd and klogd are not started .
Puppy 4 series started these daemons from /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit directly ,
newer use a /etc/init.d/ script .
I like them being started before the module loading starts
so when i set UDEV_LOG=7 in rc.sysinit the output gets directed to /var/log/messages and not to the console .